Bernhard Jensen – Blogerim בלוגריםhttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en
From the corridors of the Jewish Museum BerlinFri, 11 Aug 2017 10:16:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5Ich glaub’ nie mehr an eine Frau (Never Trust A Woman)—The Sound for the Filmhttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/02/ich-glaub-nie-mehr-an-eine-frau/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/02/ich-glaub-nie-mehr-an-eine-frau/#respondWed, 04 Feb 2015 23:11:44 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=3080There are films slumbering in an archive somewhere, waiting to be discovered. And there are films that have sunk into oblivion but then suddenly pop up again, in the form of a soundtrack.

Recently, when stock was being moved to another depot, our colleague Regina Wellen looked over the collection of 78rpm schellac records with a view to devising a new way of storing them. She thereby came across eleven not yet inventoried records, much larger than the usual sort and with a label suggestive of some other purpose than easy listening on the home gramophone. Luckily for us, Regina was quickly able to establish that these were examples of the sound-on-disc recordings played in cinemas as an accompaniment to screenings of otherwise silent films—synchronously, thanks to the built-in start signal. One of the twenty numbered boxes on each label used to be checked after each screening, so as to ensure that a worn-out record would be replaced in good time. After Regina had dry-cleaned the records and prepared appropriate packaging for them, she set about digitizing their content under the supervision of Nadja Wallaszkovits of the Austrian Audiovisual Research Archive in Vienna—this latter task as part of her Bachelors degree course at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences.

We are now in possession of the complete soundtrack for the film Ich glaub‘ nie mehr an eine Frau (Never Trust A Woman, 1929/30), which starred Richard Tauber and Gustav Gründgens and was directed by Max Reichmann, with musical direction by Paul Dessau. This film from the early days of cinema was believed to be completely lost —and, sadly, the motion footage still is. Its plot revolves around the celebrated singer Stefan (Richard Tauber), who goes to sea following an unrequited love affair, and a sailor (Werner Fuetterer), who returns home from a voyage and falls in love with a woman whom he is not supposed to love. In order to do justice to the rich timbre of Richard Tauber’s voice, the Tri-Ergon Musik AG in Berlin used its freshly patented optical sound recording technology. This method assured such a substantial improvement in quality that Siegfried Kracauer, writing in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 1 March 1930, described the sound as the most outstanding feature of Ich glaub‘ nie mehr an eine Frau: “Tauber’s voice in this film sounds perfectly pure, its nuances are faithfully reproduced and all the voices come out of the right mouths at the right moment.”

Illustrierter Filmkurier (Illustrated Film Courier) 12.1930, No. 1341

When Regina brought me the digitized film recording in various formats (which will facilitate audio restoration at a later date) for storage in the media archive, we thought about how best to archive it, long term, and also about how to ensure that the sound-on-disc recording could be easily traced if ever the film footage were found. We decided to hand over a copy of the digitized recording to the Deutsche Kinemathek. But what is a film without images? Well, you can enjoy at least a taste of how the film sounds, here, or come and listen to the complete soundtrack in the Reading Room of the Academy—and leave the images to your mind’s eye.

Richard Tauber, Paul Hörbiger, Werner Fuetterer are speaking. This is the first dialog after the intro and some indistinct voices. Then Tauber sings “Übers Meer grüß ich dich, Heimatland” (Homeland, I greet you from overseas); lyrics by Fritz Rotter.

Tracing the provenance of the artifacts held in our archive is another part of our work—yet we are unable to say with any certainty where the eleven sound-on-disc recordings come from. The Jewish Museum Berlin either acquired them in 1999 as part of an extensive package of over three hundred Richard Tauber schellac records or they somehow mysteriously made their way from the Tri-Ergon Company at Ritterstraße 43 to us here, at Lindenstraße 9-14: a distance as the crow flies of only 250 meters.

Bernhard Jensen, Library

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/02/ich-glaub-nie-mehr-an-eine-frau/feed/0
Warning: htmlspecialchars(): charset `“UTF-8″' not supported, assuming utf-8 in /srv/www/htdocs/blogs/blog-en/jmbblog-en/wp-includes/feed.php on line 479
Searching for the New Germanshttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/05/searching-for-the-new-germans/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/05/searching-for-the-new-germans/#respondTue, 27 May 2014 07:00:09 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=2109A Visit to the Academy’s Reading Room

Why do we keep books like Muslime im säkularen Rechtsstaat (Muslims in Secular Rule of Law), Diaspora Identities, or z.B. 650 Jahre Rixdorf (E.g. 650 Years of Rixdorf) at the Jewish Museum? Answering this question is the task of the Academy Programs on Migration and Diversity. How to find these books, however, falls to the library.

Imagine that you want to learn about social structures, clubs, and immigrant biographies in Berlin, particularly in Kreuzberg, to which you yourself moved from Hesse two years ago. After visiting the museum one fine Sunday afternoon, you take a look at the new Academy, where, you heard, a friend of yours recently attended an event about the ‘new Germans.’ The Academy is closed on the weekend, but a museum host informs you that it has a library. You return on Monday and ask in the reading room about Turks in Kreuzberg. The librarian would love just to tell you, “second shelf on the left, all the way to the back – what you’re looking for is right there.” Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.

We have, in fact, expanded the classification system (see this PDF-file, in German) in our open stacks on the topic of ‘Migration and Diversity.’ In contrast to how we classify Jewish history, we’ve chosen to forego regional and historical distinctions. Rather, we have tried to render different aspects of debates over the transformation from homogeneous nation states into immigration societies visible: from politics and law, religion, and minorities to education, racism, and discrimination. After all, along with the parallels between diaspora identities, there are also significant differences: while German-Jewish history goes back a good two thousand years in places such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Altona, and Berlin, Germany as a country of immigrants dates to a more recent time. In addition to this consideration, we wanted to put terms like citizenship and keywords like parallel society into an international perspective right from the start.

But back to you. You don’t follow the librarian’s advice to search for ‘Berlin’ in the online catalog. Instead you go straight to the shelf with the new classifications for ‘Migration and Diversity.’ There, you happen upon E.g. 650 Years of Rixdorf under the heading ‘Literature, Art, and Culture.’ You start planning your next weekend outing, but it’s almost 7 p.m. now and the librarian is urging your departure. In the meantime you’ve flipped through the pages of the catalog Berlin – Istanbul, glanced at the study Muslims in Berlin, and are just noticing the book Wir neuen Deutschen (We New Germans) among several other auto-/biographies – for which ‘German History’ would perhaps have been a more obvious category, but still all too easy to miss. On your way home through Oranienplatz, you remember the tents that were here until recently. Refugees, the right of residency, asylum. There must be something at the Jewish Museum about that too…

To finish, here’s a tip: Generation “Kosher Light”, p. 232 ff. You won’t find the book, by the way, under ‘Migration and Diversity’ but rather ‘The Present’, in the ‘Jewish History in Germany’ section. A Russian Jewish perspective on diversity in Kreuzberg.

Bernhard Jensen, Library

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/05/searching-for-the-new-germans/feed/0“Was Goethe a Jew too?”http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/01/was-goethe-a-jew-too/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/01/was-goethe-a-jew-too/#commentsThu, 23 Jan 2014 10:35:50 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=1667When you do a search of our library catalog for Goethe you could get this idea: 70 hits for works by or about the German poet (by contrast, Schiller only gets 16). And until a few years ago the impressive 1867 Cotta’schen edition of Goethe appeared in our permanent exhibition. Many people used to ask the visitor’s desk: “Was Goethe Jewish?” No, he wasn’t. But for many Jews he was the paragon of German culture, and his works symbolized membership in the German educated middle-class.

A few months ago, the Richard M. Meyer Foundation gave us more than 100 books by and about Richard M. Meyer himself. The son of a banker, art collector, and man of letters was a Goethe scholar. Meyer never acquired a proper professorship, but his 1895 biography of Goethe won awards and was published again and again – as a single volume, in multiple volumes, as a people’s edition and a reserved edition. According to the biography, Goethe saw “nationalities merely as transitional forms” (Volksausgabe [People’s Edition] 1913, p. 352). Statements like this illustrate the dilemma of German-Jewish assimilation during that period. If a Jewish reader of Goethe placed the poet’s cosmopolitanism in the foreground, he exposed himself to the accusation of misunderstanding the German essence of his writings. But when he explicitly recognized just this quality in Goethe’s language, his very right to have a say was contested.

As Meyer emphasized, the German “intellectual hero” did in fact employ the idea of a world literature, as well as biblical references, too: He compared the Faustian pact with the devil with the “basic motif of the wager” from the Book of Job (ibid, p.343; not included in the first edition, cf. p.356). And yet Goethe wasn’t a “ticket of admission” (Heine) to German culture: Richard M. Meyer was never baptized. He died in 1914 of cerebral apoplexy. His wife Estella, to whom the Goethe biography is dedicated, was murdered in July of 1942.

We would like you to know that we have moved into the new Academy building, with a reading room outfitted with fast computers, bright desk lamps, and a copy machine. If we sparked your interest in the Jewish reception of Goethe: please come by!

Bernhard Jensen, Library

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/01/was-goethe-a-jew-too/feed/4A Library Leaps Across the Streethttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/08/a-library-leaps-across-the-street/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/08/a-library-leaps-across-the-street/#respondThu, 01 Aug 2013 07:54:46 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=1206We have been nudged, with some pizzazz, into a situation of good luck: at last we have an open-access library. After various construction delays, we finally had a date set to move. We were supposed to be transferring from our secluded rooms on the third floor of the Libeskind Building to the new Academy Building across the street from the museum, also built by Daniel Libeskind.

While some of us were directing the book-packers in the warehouse, others were confronting the question of how to set up this new reading room with open access. Visitors would at last be able to come and go without signing in. Missing shelf labels needed to be replaced with makeshift printouts from our classification system. Information about our opening hours had to be hung at the entrance. In addition, the transport needed to be organized of rare materials from the warehouse across the street to the new reading room. On top of all this, we could not lose track, in the midst of the moving boxes, of a set of packages containing an extensive new donation to our collection. When we finally opened our doors, we learned that there would be a press event: the photographers were instantly taken with the RFID-Gate that lights up in red if someone tries to steal a book. We opened the doors again symbolically for the RBB evening television program and made our progress official: direct access to the books at last.

Then they actually came: our new visitors. They looked around curiously, through the shelves along the slanting walls. They browsed at our new acquisitions shelf, and, finding something, would sit down at the desks or into a comfortable red armchair next to the magazines. They asked whether they may check out books (no) and whether we have suggestions for their research (usually yes). They came and went with friendly hellos, whispering quietly to each other and then moving on into the Diaspora Garden. When we install our faster computers, new desk lamps, and a copy machine – all coming soon – then I hope they will all come again and share our delight in this leap we’ve made across the street.